Food can be fast, and food can be good. Some food is both. Only particular types of food lend themselves to fast preparation and service, however. We’re used to seeing burgers, pizza, fish and chips, tacos, dosas, noodles and a whole global extravaganza of street foods in our towns and cities, but one that is rarely presented at pace is Italian pasta. I have seen it served out of trucks at festivals, and it works very well for various reasons, but it’s less common than you might expect, given how popular it is for mid-price dining and home cooking. SUGO is founded on the idea that you don’t need to compromise on quality to do pasta fast. All their pasta is freshly made on site, including the ravioli which is prepared performatively at the front of the open kitchen, and all their sauces are given the time they need (which might be a minute after the pasta’s drained, or an afternoon for a ragout to thicken). This alone means that they’re going to beat mid-price chains on quality. The beauty of pasta is that all of that prep and cooking can be done ahead of time, and the time from order to plate doesn’t have to be any greater than it is for a burger.
At SUGO the operational procedure is to get as many covers through the restaurant as possible. It’s table service, and all the usual amenities of restaurant dining are available, but there is no booking, no unnecessary frippery, and it’s perfectly clear from the manner of the (utterly courteous and professional) front-of-house staff that they would like you to eat your food and fuck off as quickly as possible. This is not a pasta joint to linger over your coffee and engage the waiter in small talk, hoping to be offered a complementary limoncello with your bill. I am totally in favour of this approach. Margins in hospitality are wafer thin, and what SUGO manages to achieve by taking this approach is a price-to-quality ratio you simply don’t find in the UK. Every main is under £15, and the food is as good as you’ll find at twice the price elsewhere. Also I’m never going to complain about being served too quickly.
My bucatini was evenly coated with rich, anchovy umami, and deep. sweet heat from tomatoes and chilli, nicely elevated with a fragrant crunch of olive breadcrumbs. Spawn had tagliatelle with mushrooms, brown butter, sage and grana padano, where the sage did the same job on the flavour profile as the olive did in mine. Spouse went rich and meaty, with Tuscan sausage, porcini, butter and grana padano on her tagliatelle. The pasta was firm and flavoursome, but as it’s fresh al dente is not a possibility. Spouse and Spawn finished with affogato (once they got the soft-serve ice cream machine working), while I had a sundae with salted pecans, fudge and butterscotch sauce. The little cubes of fudge were too hard, but it was otherwise delicious.
SUGO is a great concept, and the execution is spot-on. The trade-off for the brusqueness of the service is that the whole thing is a performance. For me it was pure joy to watch a team of consummate professionals, in the kitchen and front-of-house, whizzing through their tasks like a perfectly regulated clockwork mechanism, every individual focussed, and moving with that purposeful, self-possessed body language that says ‘I’m good at this, and I am killing it.’ SUGO is a human machine, which put us on a conveyer at the front door (‘ten minutes wait, please stand there by the bar’) and delivered us a truly delicious meal followed by a swift exit to the street with gleeful precision and efficient courtesy.
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